Of Women, Poetry, and Power: Strategies of Address in Dickinson, Miles, Brooks, Lorde, and Angelou, and: Emerson's Contemporaries and Kerouac's Crowd: A Problem of Self-Location (review)

Two books of recent interest to Dickinson scholars deal with the poet's widespread (if somewhat ironic) sphere of literary influence for readers and writers alike. In Of Women, Poetry, and Power, Zofia Burr explores the possibility that current gendered assumptions about women's poetry can be specifically traced back to the critical reception of Dickinson, first in the 1890s and again during her rediscovery during the 1950s. Burr recounts a fairly standard publishing history of Dickinson's work (with some interesting bits about her initial British audience, who declared she had an "untutored quality") followed by a much longer close reading of the 1833 letter-poem "A Promise is firmer than a Hope." Burr posits that Dickinson's complicated poems-in-letters demand that we read the poems as addresses rather than mere diary entries, which she fears they are often regarded as. Indeed, part of the lure of Dickinson (and subsequently, according to Burr, American women's poetry in general) is that it is taken as a so-called "publication of secrets"(33) which in turn causes readers to neglect "how to read poems" (3) in favor of investigating complicated personal histories and subtexts.

It might seem outlandish to place the burden of misdirected literary criticism squarely on Dickinson's narrow shoulders, but Burr's bold thesis is well taken. Her claim that the "conventional form of the poem is made subordinate to the expression of individual feeling" (2) can hardly be regarded lightly under the monumental weight of biographical criticism done on Dickinson, which Burr regards as part and parcel of the "dubious central gestures and themes that have been employed to assert Dickinson's canonical status" (41). Burr doesn't discount such work, and hopes that "the poetic resonance of a work need not be purchased at the cost of all consideration of its historical context and occasion," but that "inscribing a 'poetic' text within such circumstances need not be a reductive move that leads us to neglect the specific form and discursive mode of the utterance" (66). Though Burr unfortunately confines her support to one poem here, her focused analysis of the letter-poem as a mediation between the choices made in reading "the lyric, whose mode is to speak to one as if speaking to another" and "the letter, whose mode is one of direct, personal address" (6) does allow for direct interaction between author and reader, which other, more personal readings, perhaps do not. Burr advocates that only if we situate "a 'poetic' utterance in the contexts in which it is deployed and circulated and in its concrete relations to auditors, can we begin to see the various kinds of work that poetry performs beyond the ever-present task of self-expression" (66). She then employs this method in the rest of her book with substantial close readings of Josephine Miles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou, all poets who make direct contact with Dickinson as both historical and literary forebear. This is, in fact, Burr's real project: to examine how more contemporary writers—and our own estimations of them—become shaped by Dickinson's mythic status as personalities instead of poets.

Similarly, in Emerson's Contemporaries and Kerouac's Crowd, Bradley J. Stiles examines the work of the Beat poets and the philosophies they professed to share with the writers of the American Renaissance. Along with chapters on Emerson and Whitman, Stiles devotes a chapter to Dickinson, arguing that her "ambivalence toward natural models" (46) reveals a deep frustration with a Jobish God who "would promise the soul...